In an article entitled Dark Minds: When does incredulity become paranoia, Psychology Today writer John Gartner attempts to make the case that the concerns of “conspiracy theorists” are not based in reality but are a product of mental instability, while himself fulfilling every criteria for what he claims classifies such people as psychotics – ignoring evidence that contradicts his preconceptions while embracing the ludicrous “conspiracy theory” that powerful men and governments do not conspire to advance their power.

Probably somewhat upset about how our coverage of the dangers associated with the swine flu vaccine has contributed to a global revolt against mass vaccination programs being readied, Psychology Today’s gravy train of big pharma advertisers will no doubt be pleased to see the publication wastes no time in savagely attacking radio host and film maker Alex Jones, dispensing with any notion of fairness and zealously going after him as early as the second paragraph.

The nature of this vicious hit piece (PDF link) is confirmed when Gartner laments that Jones refused to provide him with phone numbers for friends he grew up with, presumably frustrated that he couldn’t dig up some dirt from an old girlfriend to throw into the mix of what is nothing more than a personal attack on Jones’ character, and a complete departure from any debate about the issues Jones covers on his radio show, which is the phony pretext that Gartner used in order to secure the interview in the first place.

Gartner has trouble believing that eugenicists occupy powerful positions, even in the aftermath of the John P. Holdren story when Obama’s top science advisor was exposed as having advocated forced abortion, sterilization and mass drugging of the public. Despite the fact that we sent Gartner dozens of pieces of evidence for his article, he cites a single national security memorandum and dismisses it as “a bland policy report”.

The document to which he refers is National Security Study Memorandum 200, a 1974 geopolitical strategy document prepared by Rockefeller’s intimate friend and fellow Bilderberg member Henry Kissinger, which targeted thirteen countries for massive population reduction by means of creating food scarcity, sterilization and war.

The document, declassified in 1989, identified 13 countries that were of special interest to U.S. geopolitical objectives and outlined why population growth, and particularly that of young people who were seen as a revolutionary threat to U.S. corporations, was a potential roadblock to achieving these objectives. The countries named were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

The study outlined how civil disturbances affecting the “smooth flow of needed materials” would be less likely to occur “under conditions of slow or zero population growth.”

“Development of a worldwide political and popular commitment to population stabilization is fundamental to any effective strategy. This requires the support and commitment of key LDC leaders. This will only take place if they clearly see the negative impact of unrestricted population growth and believe it is possible to deal with this question through governmental action,” states the document.

The document called for integrating “family planning” (otherwise known as abortion) with routine health services for the purposes of “curbing the numbers of LDC people,” (lesser-developed countries).

The report shockingly outlines how withholding food could be used as a means of punishment for lesser-developed countries who do not act to reduce their population, essentially using food as a weapon for a political agenda by creating mass starvation in under-developed countries.

“The allocation of scarce PL480 (food) resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production,” states the document.

Later in the document, the idea of enforcing “mandatory programs” by using food as “an instrument of national power” is presented.

This is the quintessential example of powerful men conspiring to use eugenicist policies in order to advance their power. Gartner’s lazy claim that the document is just a “bland policy report” is manifestly absurd.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this isn’t a “connection” that we invented out of fresh air to make our brains release dopamine, as Gartner’s bizarre hit piece goes on to claim, it’s there in black and white, but Gartner has either failed to read the whole document or has performed his own act of psychological gymnastics and summarily dismissed the evidence because it does not fit with his preconceptions – the very charge he levels at “conspiracy theorists” in his hit piece.

Gartner says conspiracy theorists are “immune to evidence” and yet he displays that very trait in this instance.

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It isn’t long before Gartner regurgitates the tired old cliche about people needing to create conspiracy theories and some semblance of order to make themselves feel better in a chaotic world. He even claims that “finding meaning in sometimes insignificant events” creates dopamine, an overproduction of which can lead to schizophrenia. Of course, none of this has any relation whatsoever to powerful people planning the future of the planet that they rule (a ridiculous “conspiracy theory” in Gartner’s mind), but Gartner’s objective isn’t to disprove the claims of Alex Jones in a logical manner, it’s to denounce the messenger using convoluted and ham-fisted psychological rhetoric that isn’t even applicable.

But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. The greatest purveyors of myths and “conspiracy theories” about political events have and always will be authorities and governments. Scientists who recently investigated why so many people believed the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 found that Americans wanted to believe that Iraq was connected to 9/11 because it helped them make sense of current reality. How is that any different from the claim that conspiracy theorists invent connections to help them better comprehend current events?

Beyond the accusations of who invents what to justify their worldview – conspiracists and debunkers alike – are the facts. History is littered with political conspiracies that actually happened and were not the manifestation of unstable minds.

Indeed, history tells us that the bigger the lie, the bigger the conspiracy, the more likely the masses are to believe it, and governments throughout the ages have harnessed this trick to pursue their agendas since time began. In such an environment, those who aggressively question the official authodoxy, or “conspiracy theorists” as Gartner labels them, should be welcomed as a key bulwark against the kind of tyranny and oppression that has blighted the world at numerous intervals in the past, aided in no small part by the quack psychologists in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that classified skepticism of the state as a mental illness, an implication Gartner regurgitates in his hit piece.

It was not deception on behalf of “conspiracy theorists” that convinced Germans to follow Adolf Hitler, the lies that built the Nazi tyranny came directly from the state. It was not the beliefs of “conspiracy theorists” that hoodwinked Americans into thinking Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that particular “big lie” came directly from the lips of the President of the United States.

“We’re all conspiracy theorists to some degree,” writes Gartner and never has a truer word been spoken. Gartner has to be the biggest conspiracy theorist of all because he seems to hold the ludicrous belief that powerful men do not get together and plan things, which in Gartner’s mind is a viewpoint indicative of a psychotic mind.

As is always the case, the debunker, in this case Gartner, completely fails to grasp that his stance is completely out of touch with modern day sentiment. He poses as some kind of authority figure casting down his disdain upon the bedraggled minority of “conspiracy theorists” below, yet he is in the minority. It is Gartner’s twilight zone world of angelic governments who commit no sin except within the twisted minds of dangerous psychotics, in light of admitted conspiracies that continue to be exposed on an almost daily basis – the phony terror alerts, the cronyism of the banker bailout, the torture scandal, that represents a genuine display of psychotic thinking.

Gartner is really scraping the barrel when he unearths a 7-year-old incident about a disturbed man attempting to enter Bohemian Grove carrying guns in an effort to portray conspiracy theorists, an in particular Alex Jones, as a physical danger to society.

In reality, the kind of warped thinking that Gartner embraces, that skepticism of government is a form of mental illness, is one of the most dangerous threats to a free society that ever existed.

As we have seen before in history, the designation of political opinions deemed to be antagonistic towards or even merely skeptical of the state as a psychological illness is a hallmark of tyranny.

In the former Soviet Union, psikhushkas — mental hospitals — were used by the state as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The Soviet state began using mental hospitals to punish dissidents in 1939 under Stalin.

According to official Soviet psychiatry and the Moscow Serbsky Institute at the time, “ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure.” Treatment for this special political schizophrenia included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, electromagnetic torture, radiation torture, lumbar punctures, various drugs — such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin — and beatings. Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, indicates that at least 365 sane people were treated for “politically defined madness,” although she surmises there were many more.

These kind of “treatments” for the “mental illness” of being a conspiracy theorist or merely being skeptical of government were brutally enforced by quack psychologists in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, a fact that Gartner, trapped in his bubble of delusion and ignorance of any evidence that contradicts with his preconceptions, claimed to be completely unaware of when we confronted him with it.

Quack psychologists like Gartner who define distrust of authorities and alternative explanations for the “official story” put out by governments who have repeatedly proven themselves to be liars as a form of psychosis are themselves as mentally unstable as their much vaunted peers – people like the insane cocaine addict Sigmund Freud and the Nazi child abuser Alfred Kinsey – and represent a far greater danger to society than the “conspiracy theorists” that they so readily seek to denigrate.